1. Field
This disclosure relates to placing advertisements in web pages accessed via the Internet, and specifically to tracking advertisements that are abandoned without being viewed.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet and the World Wide Web have made a vast body of knowledge available to anyone with a computer and a network connection. As of 2009, the World Wide Web included about 180 million websites.
Within this patent, the term “publisher” means a company, government entity, or other organization that provides a web site accessible via the internet. Publishers may provide all of the content of their web sites, or may embed content provided by other sources. For example, many websites are supported, at least in part, by advertisements presented within web pages. Publishers of ad-supported web sites may sell space on their web pages for advertisements.
In this patent, an “ad broker” is a company that places ads in publisher web pages. The ad broker may broker such ad space between publishers and advertisers. The ad broker may act as a media buyer that purchases ad space from publishers and sells the space to various advertisers or advertising agencies.
A publisher may be paid and an advertiser may be charged for each “impression”, or each time the advertiser's ad appears on the publisher's website. The publisher may be paid, and the advertiser may be charged, an additional “clickthrough” amount for each viewer who interacts with the ad, for example by clicking on the ad or an element within the ad.
The number of ad impressions is typically determined by the number of calls to an ad server to load the ad, which is not necessarily the same as the number of times that the ad is actually seen by a viewer. This is because a web page takes time to render, and viewers will often leave a page before the rendering is complete. When a viewer leaves a web page before the web page is fully displayed, the viewer is said to “abandon” the page. Since publisher web pages may load and display ads last, an abandoned page may result in one or more abandoned ads. Because of abandonment, the number of calls to the ad server to load an ad is typically greater than the number of actual viewings of the ad.
To improve the accuracy of counting impressions of an ad, the ad may contain one or more embedded objects that have to be called from the ad server while the ad is being rendered. For example, the ad may contain a single pixel image, commonly called a one-by-one image, that has to be loaded from the ad server. The call to load this image may be logged by the ad server as an indication that the rendering of the ad has progressed to at least some extent. This approach is not completely accurate since, in some circumstances, web browsers may not load one-by-one images. In addition, the loading of an image within an ad can be asynchronous with displaying the ad to the viewer. Sometimes, a one-by-one image is called sufficiently in advance of displaying the ad such that the ad can be abandoned after the one-by-one image is called.
Traditionally, web pages were written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Currently, to provide a variety of content including audio, video, and/or animation, web pages may be written in a combination of HTML and other platforms including Extended Markup Language (XML), Java, and Adobe Flash. Most ads to be embedded in web pages are written using Flash. Flash is a multimedia platform including a suite of program instructions, data structures, and file formats used to create objects that can be played or rendered by a Flash player coupled to a web browser. Flash supports text, graphics, animation, audio, video, and/or viewer interaction.
Most web page ads conform to standards set by an industry association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The IAB has defined a plurality of standard ad formats, commonly referred to as “ad units”. Within this patent, the term “ad unit object” refers to the programming code and associated data that causes an ad unit to be displayed within a web page. Conventional ad unit objects are usually Flash objects hosted on servers operated by an advertising broker or a third-party provider. An ad unit object may be written by the advertising broker, the third-party provider, or the advertiser.
Throughout this description, elements appearing in figures are assigned three-digit reference designators, where the most significant digit is the figure number where the element is introduced and the two least significant digits are specific to the element. An element that is not described in conjunction with a figure may be presumed to have the same characteristics and function as a previously-described element having the same reference designator.